Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, a complex litigation law firm with offices in 10 cities, today announced that it has launched a practice representing plaintiffs in intellectual property cases including patents, copyrights and trade secrets.

The firm’s managing partner Steve W. Berman will lead the practice group, using existing Hagens Berman attorneys throughout the firm’s 10 offices and adding legal talent in the Minneapolis office over the course of the year.

Unlike many firms in the intellectual properties arena, Hagens Berman’s practice will only represent plaintiffs, avoiding the potential conflicts of interest that often hamper firms that also defend corporate clients.

“It is not uncommon for a plaintiff to be months into a case before a firm realizes it is conflicted, scrapping the case and wasting time and enormous resources,” Berman said. “Our approach will let our clients know that when we accept a case, we are there for the duration, and there for the win.”

Berman also noted that the firm’s results-driven fee arrangements should be very attractive to plaintiffs who are often hamstrung by the up-front fees and expenses associated with filing IP suits.

“Like much of our other plaintiff work, our fees are driven by our success rather than the demands of the billable hour,” Berman concluded. “We are entrepreneurially driven and encourage our attorneys to use out-of-the-box thinking to achieve success.”

Berman added that he believes the IP litigation practice should succeed for the same reasons Hagens Berman has been so successful in other areas of litigation. “We believe that when we meld the talents of exceptionally smart attorneys in an environment that encourages tenacity and creativity, good things happen for our clients.”

The firm has developed a reputation for winning cases that others found too complex, or against much larger, well-financed defendants, a tradition Berman believes the firm will replicate in the new IP practice.

“We enjoy taking on the big cases, against the big defendants and winning for our clients,” Berman noted. “With our IP practice, we have another way to make that happen.”

Hagens Berman has been named to the National Law Journal’s Plaintiffs' Hot List – an award given to the nation’s most successful plaintiffs firms – for four of the past five years. In addition, Berman has been named one of the “100 Most Influential Attorneys” in the nation by the same publication.